
That is fucking hilarious... Couldnt happen to a better bunch of people...
Facebook's first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers. Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a "humidity event" within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network's infrastructure king …
That'll explain the chat bar being out of action and everyone bitching about it, but isn't one benefit of a "cloud" that it can withstand the loss of service at one location and be able to at least limp along with other sites until things are straightened out?
Admittedly, this is probably peak time of day for their servers and don't know how many locations FB has.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VILWkqlQLWk
On a related note many very tall/large buildings suffer from the same problem. It wasn't unheard of for certain transmission masts to have rain inside their centre tube as the top of the mast was much colder than the bottom, and Boeing's massive construction building suffers from indoor rain on occasion.
A well designed data centre should be able to cope with heat, fire, power outage and excessive humidity and moisture. Surely in the type of data centres that Facebook designs they'd have moisture / humidity detectors, alarms, and emergency aircon that kicks in when the ideal environment is no longer sustainable.
Clearly there is a risk of this problem occurring but there's no protection against it - apart from rainjackets! That doesn't protect everything or avoid the risk of people getting electrocuted. I'm sure they can afford whatever it costs to install emergency aircon and powerful fans to help avoid expensive and embarrassing future outburst of indoor rain.
I wouldn't be so sure that an HVAC system suitable for such a data-center would be cheaper than simply replacing a few hundred/thousand/whatever servers every now and then when this sort of thing happens. If a (probably very cheap) rubber gasket can reduce hardware failures by a decent percentage and they install a warning system so they can move the compute load off-site (and temporarily shut down the facility), then such an HVAC system wouldn't sense.
The Great Baker House Snow Hack?
http://museum.mit.edu/nom150/entries/1446
http://tech.mit.edu/archives/VOL_087/TECH_V087_S0582_P001.pdf
Something tells me this story has about as much reality behind it. Or maybe somebody could explain how taking hot dry air, running it through water so that it become cool (relatively) wet air, then mixing it with more hot dry air will result in condensation? Getting perilously close to perpetual motion there.
I suppose somebody will end up tying this to ":and therefore we see that climate change may not be manmade":